t
AEthelstan no sooner incorporated Northumbria with his dominions than
dread of Wessex took the place of dread of the Danelaw. The Scot King
Constantine organized a league of Scot, Cumbrian, and Welshman with the
northmen. The league was broken by AEthelstan's rapid action in 926; the
North-Welsh were forced to pay annual tribute, to march in his armies,
and to attend his councils; the West-Welsh of Cornwall were reduced to a
like vassalage, and finally driven from Exeter, which they had shared
till then with its English inhabitants, But eight years later the same
league called AEthelstan again to the North; and though Constantine was
punished by an army which wasted his kingdom while a fleet ravaged its
coasts to Caithness the English army had no sooner withdrawn than
Northumbria rose in 937 at the appearance of a fleet of pirates from
Ireland under the sea-king Anlaf in the Humber. Scot and Cumbrian fought
beside the northmen against the West-Saxon King; but his victory at
Brunanburh crushed the confederacy and won peace till his death. His
brother Eadmund was but eighteen at his accession in 940, and the North
again rose in revolt. The men of the Five Boroughs joined their kinsmen
in Northumbria; once Eadmund was driven to a peace which left him king
but south of the Watling Street; and only years of hard fighting again
laid the Danelaw at his feet.

[Sidenote: Dunstan]

But policy was now to supplement the work of the sword. The completion of
the West-Saxon realm was in fact reserved for the hands, not of a king or
warrior, but of a priest. Dunstan stands first in the line of
ecclesiastical statesmen who counted among them Lanfranc and Wolsey and
ended in Laud. He is still more remarkable in himself, in his own vivid
personality after eight centuries of revolution and change. He was born
in the little hamlet of Glastonbury, the home of his father, Heorstan, a
man of wealth and brother of the bishops of Wells and of Winchester. It
must have been in his father's hall that the fair, diminutive boy, with
scant but beautiful hair, caught his love for "the vain songs of
heathendom, the trifling legends, the funeral chaunts," which afterwards
roused against him the charge of sorcery. Thence too he might have
derived his passionate love of music, and his custom of carrying his harp
in hand on journey or visit. Wandering scholars of Ireland had left their
books in the monastery of Glastonbury, as they left them along the R